Stigma, shame, anger and rejection are among the consequences faced by Muslim women in Canada who marry non-Muslim men

Note: Multi-faith Metro Vancouver is a place of high rates of intermarriage and inter-ethnic dating. With Muslims now comprising the second largest religion in Canada, I’m re-posting this piece in response to interest from non-Muslim men and women who are finding themselves falling for Muslims. And vice versa. DT

Vancouver Sun ARCHIVES
Saturday, Oct. 4, 1997
Column: Douglas Todd

The murder this week by Muslim fundamentalists of 11 women in Algeria who refused to wear veils was another shocking example of how the struggle between religious fundamentalism and gender equality can play out in some authoritarian Islamic countries.

The consequeneces for Muslim women in Canada who choose not to adhere to the strict tenets of their faith are less severe, certainly less violent, but they still exist, especially when the issue is marriage.

Like tens of thousands of Canadian Muslims, Amina Ali is tormented by her religion’s marriage rules. Islam, now the second largest religion in Canada, teaches that it is sinful for Muslim women, but not Muslim men, to marry outside the faith.

The 36-year-old Indonesian-born Ali loves her Canadian-born husband – but they argue about religion all the time. And in her more fiery moments, Ali admits, she has told her husband she never would have married him if she knew he wasn’t going to seriously try to practise Islam.

Ali and another Muslim woman, Tannis (a pseudonym), agreed to talk about the Muslim marriage double-bind in a Victoria apartment, while their children played in the background.

Barefoot in a green polka-dot dress, Ali is a vivacious, naturally outgoing person. She moved to the Vancouver Island city after marrying her geologist husband, Retno Buckley, while he was working in Indonesia.

Her spirited personality helps explain why she has become one of the rare Muslim women, even in Canada, willing to speak about the marriage pressure her religion creates on women.

“I feel I have to tell the truth now. My husband says, `Tell the truth.’ But sometimes it’s so hard for me.”

Muslim women face conflict with their religion, families and Canada’s multicultural ethos because of this devastating formula:

1. Islam expects all Muslims to marry.

2. Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslim men.

3. Muslim men can (and do) marry non-Muslim women.

4. Therefore, there is a shortage of unmarried Muslim men. That means many Muslim women don’t marry at all, which is against the teachings of their religion. Or they marry non-Muslim men, which Islam judges a grave sin.

Professor Yvonne Haddad, a prominent Islamic scholar at the University of Massachussets, says that Canadian census figures, which are far more detailed than U.S. census data, reveal the extent of the marriage threat to North America’s roughly two million Muslim women.

About half of those women marry non-Muslim men who either convert or, like Ali’s husband, suggest to mosque imams they intend to, but don’t follow through, Haddad says.

The other half marry non-Muslim men, and live with the consequences.

“That means 15 per cent of Canadian Muslim women, and probably a higher percentage in the U.S., are living in sin,” says Haddad.

“In the Middle East, a woman who does that might be killed. There have been cases. People pretend it doesn’t exist, but it’s a reality.”

About half of Muslim women in Canada marry non-Muslim men who either convert or suggest to mosque imams they intend to, but don’t follow through. The other half marry non-Muslim men, and live with the consequences. “That means 15 per cent of Canadian Muslim women … are living in sin,” says Prof. Haddad.

Women would not dare discuss the marriage bind in hard-line Muslim countries such as Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh or Afghanistan, where fundamentalists have interpreted Islamic teaching to mean single Muslim women must be flogged if found alone alone with a man, a raped woman is unfit for marriage and female writers must face death threats for saying religious laws don’t give women full rights.

In Canada, the U.S. and Europe, the repercussions for women who marry non-Muslims are less brutal than in many Muslim countries, but they’re still serious. They include stigma, shame, anger and often separation from the extended family.

Tannis says she worries she may have offended Allah by marrying a non-Muslim.

The anguish and uncertainty of the marriage double-bind for the East African-raised Tannis is even stronger than it has been for Ali. Tannis wedded a non-Muslim Canadian in 1992. The marriage is barely working out.

“I remember God telling me: `Don’t marry a non-Muslim.’ But I did,” Tannis says, dejection crossing her broad, handsome 27-year-old face. “I was doing my best. I prayed for him to become a Muslim. But it didn’t happen because he was in a difficult time. I was feeling regret: Why did I do it?’ I was freaking out. But he’s got a good heart. I’m feeling calmer now.”

Children are the crux of the Muslim law against women marrying outside the faith. Islam teaches that Muslim identity is transferred through the father. That makes it all right for Muslim men to marry non-Muslim women, because they don’t pass on the faith.

Although other religions, such as Judaism and Catholicism, also tend to frown on intermarriage, the stigma against it in North America is not that strong. In North America, more than half of the marriages involving Catholics or Jews are intermarriages, compared to roughly one-quarter of the marriages involving Muslims.

Due to high immigration, Islam has recently surpassed Judaism to become the second-largest religion in Canada, according to Hassan Hamdani, a Muslim who is also a Statistics Canada researcher. Islam has more than 400,000 adherents in Canada (about 10 per cent of them in B.C.), while Judaism has about 360,000 adherents.

But Canada’s Muslim population remains a small fraction of the world’s 1.2-billion Muslims – who range from a minority who emphasize individual liberty, including freedom of religious practice, to the large majority who more rigorously adhere to sharia, or Muslim law.

Simon Fraser University Islamic history professor William Cleveland says it would be hard to find an immigrant Muslim woman from the Middle East who would marry a non-Muslim. The only Muslims in Canada who would dare intermarry are Canadian-born or from countries, including some in Asia and Africa, that interpret Muslim doctrine less absolutely.

Alexandra Bain, who teaches Islamic art at the University of Victoria, says the pressure to marry a Muslim man creates an additional danger for Muslim women in Canada. Desperate for a Muslim man to marry, they look offshore for husbands. That leaves them vulnerable to being taken advantage of by men who marry only to gain landed-immigrant status, says Bain, a Canadian of French descent who converted to Islam when she was a teenager

Bain says her marriage to a Muslim man from Eritrea ended up on the rocks – not necessarily because of immigration issues, but because he was too bound by his culture’s strict interpretation of Islamic law, including those regarding women.

“I love the religion with all my heart, but I don’t like that the women don’t have choice,” Bain says.

Most of the Muslims who have immigrated to Canada in the past decade are ultra-orthodox, says Bain. The newcomers are making things hard for the relatively tiny number of Canadian-born Muslims, many of whom have become more open to intermarriage. The new ultra-orthodox immigrants, Bain is finding, are dominating Canadian mosques and clamping down on any moves toward greater freedom.

While the Muslim women sip tea and watch their children play on the patio, Tannis listens to Ali talking about how her parents in Indonesia don’t yet know that her husband has not bothered to follow Muslim practice since they moved to Canada seven years ago.

To get married, Ali’s husband had to recite the shahada – “There is no God but God” and “Mohammed is the Messenger of God” – an act that is considered the essence and beginning of being a Muslim.

But, as with many men who make gestures of converting to Islam at the time of their marriage, the commitment of Ali’s husband to Islam did not last. Muslim community members are now constantly asking Ali why her husband does not attend mosque.

“I have had to cover for him all the time.” Ali believes they are judging her. And she realizes it will get worse when her story appears in print. But Ali is not too fretful because she knows her husband has faith in God. And she believes only God, on Judgment Day, can truly know what is in a person’s heart.

Despite the evidence, official Muslim representatives deny that many Muslim women struggle in a marriage quagmire.

Sister Zuleika Hussein, official women’s representative at the Sunni Muslim mosque in Richmond, claims she doesn’t know of any Muslim woman in Greater Vancouver who has married outside the faith. “It’s a serious sin,” she says.

Hussein, an immigrant from British Guyana, admits she knows of Muslim women who fall in love with non-Muslim men. But she insists the men always convert and turn into devout Muslims.

Hussein says the different marriage rules for Muslim men and women come out of the Koran. Koran 2.21 says Muslim men and women cannot marry non-Muslims. Koran 5.5 , however, adapts the rule to say it is lawful for Muslim men to marry

“There is a lot of heartache,” says the president of the Canadian Muslim Women’s Association. She adds that imams won’t talk to non-Muslims about difficulties followers have with marriage.

virtuous Christian or Jewish women. Since the Koran is silent on whether women get the same privilege, Muslim sharia has declared women do not.

Fehmida Khan, president of the Canadian Muslim Women’s Association, explains that Muslim imams and other religious officials won’t talk to non-Muslims about difficulties followers have with marriage.

“They’re only there to give the rules and regulations,” says Khan, an India-born businesswoman living in Ontario who calls herself a Muslim community leader, as opposed to religious leader.

“There is a lot of heartache if a Muslim woman marries a non-Muslim,” Khan said.

“The family will want to keep it quiet. They won’t take the same pleasure as they would in a religious marriage. Some grandparents might start by saying, `I’m never going to see my daughter or grandchild.”’

Khan, despite her willingness to admit to problems in Muslim culture, acknowledges she is caught between Muslim tradition and Canadian multicultural attitudes that are open to intermarriage.

But she still opposes it. Her grown children aren’t married. And she frets about who they may hook up with. She is trying hard not to interfere.

At least, Khan says, Muslims won’t excommunicate a woman who marries outside the faith. So there is always a chance for reconciliation.

“I know people who have married non-Muslims and the family has rallied after several years when they realize they are losing out on the children.”

One of the main reasons Khan continues to oppose intermarriage is her conviction that a Muslim marriage is much more likely to overcome domestic troubles.

Tannis, despite defending her decision to marry a non-Muslim, acknowledges that stresses increase when children don’t have a Muslim religious upbringing. When she sees aimless street kids in Vancouver, Tannis prays that her children won’t end up like them. “I want them to get away from that through religion.”

As for Ali, she still feels she and her husband can make a go of it, despite their disagreements over religion. But she also feels blessed that her children have been given the ultimate escape hatch from the marriage predicament facing Muslim women.

She’s very happy her children are both boys.

“I was so scared they’d be girls.”

LEVELS OF INTOLERANCE

Challenges for Muslim women who want to marry non-Muslims echo globally. This is Conservative Peer Baroness Warsi, named “Britain’s most powerful Muslim Woman”

In Canada, foreign-born Muslims are much more opposed to intermarriage than Canadian-born Muslims – and they make up the vast majority of Muslims in Canada.

Only about four per cent of foreign-born Muslim women in Canada will intermarry, says Hassan Hamdani, a Muslim researcher who studies Muslim demographics through his job with Statistics Canada in Ottawa.

But evidence of second-generation Muslims embracing Canadians’ openness to intermarriage is strong, Hamdani says. Almost 40 per cent of Canadian-born Muslim families consist of a Muslim wife and non-Muslim husband.

Regardless of whether one opposes intermarriage or approves of it, there is substance to Muslim leaders’ fears that children raised in an intermarried family could be lost to the Islamic fold.

Roughly 77 per cent of Canadian children raised by a Muslim mother and non-Muslim father do not count themselves Muslim (the Muslim drop-out rate is 60 per cent of children raised by a Muslim father and non-Muslim mother).

By contrast, when both Canadian parents are Muslims, Hamdani’s study suggests 99 per cent of their children maintain a commitment to the religion.

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